Mark Taylor

The Monster at the End of This Story is Sesame Street special on HBO Max.

Lesson 9 is a short film about the loss of a lover to insanity. Part horror story, noir-like mystery and disaster film, Lesson 9 weaves together shards of a narrative that has been shattered like excerpts from the journal of a lover gone mad. A disaster movie after the disaster, the film uses three different definitions of possession to form its thematic structure and to explore love, loss, sexuality and insanity.

A "Frankenstein's monster" of a movie, stitched together with parts robbed from the graveyard of B-movie horror and sci-fi films. A colorful, animated paper collage, the video is assembled from scraps of 1950s and '60s children's books, how-to manuals, science texts and encyclopedias. A "biography" using science fiction elements to explore the classic themes (otherness, paranoia, alternate reality) of the genre. The video is a life story constructed from pieces of other stories, much the way we base our ideas of self on pieces of information we receive from our environment.

A slow motion sky is blotted out by a deep black helicopter that chases a woman off the screen. A coin spins in deep space. A hand grabs. It's hard to breathe. Peace is exploded. One struggle disintegrates into another as a relationship shatters and blows the home to bits.